AsBAA PRESENTS CHEQUE TO ORBIS

AsBAA, the Asian region’s non-for-profit representative body for business aviation, today presented a cheque to the Orbis Charity for HKD250,000, the amount raised by members at the Inaugural Awards and Charity Gala Dinner held at Hullett House in November 2015.

AsBAA Chairman, Mr. Charlie Mularski said; “At #ABACE15 at our annual AGM meeting in April, Orbis was selected to be AsBAA’s Charity of Choice for the next five years. It was decided to organise a Charity Gala Dinner in order to raise funds for Orbis at the Inaugural Awards presentations held in November of the same year – our target was USD25,000 in our first year and we have exceeded our own expectations in the first 10 months, this is credit to our generous members and the success of our association’s rejuvenation”.

The cheque was presented to Mary Lau and Carmen Ho from Orbis, by Mr. Charlie Mularski, AsBAA Chairman, at the ICON Hotel in TST, Hong Kong, on Wednesday, 27 January. Mary Lau provided a short introduction to Orbis and a presentation on activities in the region.

Wally Yu, spokesperson for Orbis, advised “the money raised by AsBAA will go towards one of Orbis China’s new blind prevention programs in 2016 – A National Pilot Program of Comprehensive Training for Eye Care Teams at China’s County Hospitals. This is a new four-year program during which Orbis will collaborate with the Chinese National Blindness Prevention Committee (NPBLC) and the China Ophthalmology Society (COS). The primary objective is to create a curriculum and sustainable training model in comprehensive eye care for China county hospital healthcare teams including physicians, nurses and administrators. Additionally, Orbis would like to establish a three-tier training system for rural teams in Sichuan, Hebei, Shandong and Guangdong, where 60 managers, 120 county-level doctors, 60 refractionists and 120 nurses will receive hands-on training, followed by additional supervised surgery and outcome monitoring at their own facilities by trainers.

The chief beneficiaries of this project will be China’s largest vulnerable group: rural-dwellers. Women and children, who disproportionately remain behind in rural areas as a consequence of heavy urban migration, will also benefit. The project will create a truly national model for comprehensive training of rural eye care teams, under the direction of leading national bodies, and in so doing will remove the greatest barrier to eye health for rural-dwellers: inadequate access to high-quality, affordable care.

This project is a pilot for a planned national program. We are looking at impact of creating scalable models for establishing (through training) sustainable rural health care teams (ophthalmologists, nurses, refractionists, optometrists, health care workers)… a model MOH (Minister of Health) has asked us to create and helps push eye health care down below provincial level, pushing hands on training for county level doctors which is very rare and much needed. The budget of this program is RMB 7.3 million. 80% of funding is donated by Standard Chartered Bank and 12.7% is contributed by Orbis. We are now seeking 7.3% donation (RMB 540,000) this year, so the funds from AsBAA will help us to achieve this goal”.

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